i feel like i’ve been out of touch with everyone for a long time. it’s already mid-late september and i haven’t posted on the blog or gone over to ben and jon’s in ages. all of a sudden, i woke up yesterday morning and it was cool outside. Genuinely, honestly upper 60′s cool. the sky was completely cloudless. cool, cloudless, autumnal… when i closed my eyes i was transported to a grassy hillside, with towering red-brick buildings above, crunching yellow and crimson-brown leaves on my way to the Mercer engineering building. that stark blue sky, wide and deep and dark in the fall, with the dried-up sun leaning low in the sky, inspired poetry during my freshman year. i open my eyes, and the faded light from that 4 year old memory was obscured by the intensity of the morning rush. just a few seconds of total recall can coat your thoughts with favorite, nostalgic lingering flavors of the past. now that i think about it, since those 4 years have fled by, an incredible number of significant changes have occurred in the world.
it’s been hot and dank for so long here in south LA that the change in temperature + humidity was like a change in mood.
so my nearly 4-month old marriage is going pretty well these days. i had a plan to post a little update on our complex, developing relationship. the premise is: marriage is a whole new world of joys and pains. however, the familiarity of it all is completely disarming. we’re both, essentially, the same people we were before we got married. but everything is different… and i didn’t think it needed to be different. anyways, i was going to write a bit about it, and then last week desiree showed me her take of things, which she posted on her blog, and i think she says it very well. so read that.
Inkscape is a software for creating vector graphics, and boasts many features of professional graphic software like text kerning and beizer curve manipulation. the kicker is that it’s free! it runs on windows, linux, and mac under X11. when i first got it a long time ago, i thought it was pretty obtuse and it ran very slow. however, i recently opened it up to create a diagram of sorts and found just the opposite… it is extremely powerful and the help file shows the in-depth functions for doing just about anything. Here are some examples of some graphics that one could make with inkscape. Since i have such wonderful tools at my disposal, you can expect a little visual refreshment to be coming to davidcomeaux.com et al. in the future. I know, it’s exciting. you should forget i said anything so that when you click on the bookmark one day and everything has changed you can be like “Wow that is so refreshingly surprising! and it looks great too!”
i got a haircut recently. haircuts are mostly sense-driven experiences for me… i have a propensity to fixate upon touch to my head, neck and back. Not so much erogenous zones, more like comforting and relaxing. i think it goes back to the days when mom or nanny or grandmere would tickle the kids’ necks and backs. Nowadays, the feeling manifests itself in immobilizing comfort… Julie, i know, still has this response to back-touch as well. much like a puppy getting a belly rub, we will orient ourselves as to provide easy access to the surface area in question, and essentially pass out. all of our brain functions are temporarily suspended to concentrate on the curious and immensely soothing feelings coming from our nerve endings, so it takes great effort to speak or move otherwise. So when i get a haircut, and this has been the case for my whole life, i tend to close my eyes and remain silent. starting with the shampoo, i am paying for professional, functional touch that serves 2 purposes: hygeine and relaxation. I happen to enjoy it quite a lot. Curry Smith has a story, that i remember always, about getting a professional shave in pre-katrina new orleans. I hope one day i can get that experience as well: women get manicures and pedicures and facials and spa treatments, and men get shave and a haircut.
My wife does not have the same instantaneous reaction to back-neck-scalp touch that i do. I’d love to be able to offer the same kind of physical relaxation to her that i get from that, but it’s not that simple. Which brings me to my next question: everyone seems to have similar sensitivity (as far as pressure) scales as far as touch goes, but how do people develop different responses to touch? why are some people obscenely ticklish and others not? they both feel the same pressure and light force across the skin, but the brain’s pleasure/pain response can be completely opposite.
i don’t know.
Speaking of touch. The iPod Touch, which i would call the iPhone minus Phone, is incredibly cool. WiFi! Safari! in your hand! the whole internet! An incredible development for the much-more-than-music player. One day, WiFi will be everywhere, and devices like this are going to create the demand. Now, i’m no security expert, but the one roadblock to immediate ubiquity of Wifi is the relative insecurity of wireless data transmission. Not exactly a closed loop.
Speaking of security. Desiree and i watched the first two Bourne movies a while back and we agreed that they are pretty thrilling. Recently, we watched The Bourne Ultimatum. In the Bourne movies, the premise is that the CIA can basically do anything imaginable and get away with it. Something that i really doubt, however, is the ability for a small team of computer-using agents can pull up surveillance cameras, satellite imagery, bank transactions, practically any data that can be recorded in the entire world, instantly. I know it’s just a movie, but seriously? It should take at least days to find, let alone realtime-download, what they can pull up on their compy with 2 keystrokes. What surveillance cameras do you know that are accessible over networks with super-high-speed data transfer, that are remotely controllable, with an infinite resolution so you can zoom in and read the name of designer on somebody’s wristwatch? WTF? Sure, people are smart. but let’s be reasonable about the limits of technology.
Anyways, if you’ve made it all the way to the bottom of this entry, congratulations! i need to post more often.
Aaah, and so refreshing!
Its good to know you are still with us. I was beginning to wonder. Love you.
Oh, is there a different kind of feeling or relaxation relative to your relationship with that person touching you? Is it the person who imparts the feeling and/or their particular touch that affects you? the shape of their hands or fingers, in part, perhaps? I tend to think there is a lot to “read” or learn in a person’s touch and some people’s touch I will never feel comfortable with.
Thanks, David, for bringing your life story back to LIFE!